Josh Howard, CBS Producer, Resigns Over Flawed Report

By JACQUES STEINBERG

Published: March 23, 2005

Josh Howard, who became executive producer of the Wednesday edition of ''60 Minutes'' not long before it broadcast a flawed report on the National Guard service of President Bush, announced yesterday that he had agreed to resign. He did so more than two months after Leslie Moonves, chairman of CBS and co-president of Viacom, its parent company, had requested his resignation.

Neither Mr. Howard, who had worked at CBS for more than two decades, nor CBS officials would discuss the terms of his departure.

In a statement, the network said Mr. Howard had served the news division ''with distinction'' in a variety of roles, including as a deputy to Don Hewitt, who stepped down last year as executive producer of ''60 Minutes.'' In his own statement, Mr. Howard said, ''While I am proud of all I have accomplished at CBS News over my entire 23-year career, it has become clear to me that the time has come for me to move on.''

Mr. Howard, one of three top journalists at the network whom Mr. Moonves had asked to resign,was the last to do so. A fourth, Mary Mapes, who produced the guard segment, was fired by Mr. Moonves on Jan. 10, the day he received the report of an independent panel.

St. Martin's Press announced this week that it had acquired the rights to a memoir by Ms. Mapes, who also produced the CBS News report last year that broke the news of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The book, to be published in the fall, ''will chronicle what really happened at CBS,'' St. Martin's said.

The independent panel found that Ms. Mapes and her colleagues had pushed the report onto the air to scoop CBS's competitors, without properly vetting the documents on which it was based. In a statement in January, Mr. Moonves, citing the panel, said Mr. Howard ''did little to assert his role as the producer ultimately responsible for the broadcast and everything in it.''

In something of a rebuttal, supporters of Mr. Howard were circulating e-mail messages yesterday that reproduced passages from the panel's report that suggested his role was more nuanced. The panel referred, for example, to an e-mail message Mr. Howard sent to a superior suggesting that CBS News acknowledge that it might have fallen victim to a hoax, a recommendation that was rejected.